Chatbot Created By 14-Year-Old Shows (a lot of) Promise

Published March 1st at 12:00am

Chatbots can be created for many different purposes and they’re said to revolutionise the way we interact with services and companies online. It has not been long since the introduction of this new technology, some chatbots have been more successful than others but one, in particular, stands out and it has been created by a 14-year-old!

Alec Jones from Victoria, Canada has been working on Christopher Bot for the past six months, a chatbot that helps students keep a track of their homework over the course of a week. Students can share their class schedule with the bot and a quick message is sent at the end of every lesson asking if any homework has been set.

When a task has been entered the student can refer back to it at any time to see everything they need to do. The bot will congratulate the student when their homework is completed and will automatically remove the task from the list. It is also programmed to stay quiet during the holidays.

Christopher Bot was featured on Product Hunt, a website where new products are shared in a list format with a similar voting system to Reddit. It received incredibly positive reviews and a lot of feature requests.

"You're solving a problem many students have," read one reply. Another said "Fellow 14 year old here, great job man! That's sick that you’re my age and made such a cool and useful product. Awesome!"

Alec’s development shows how younger generations can learn and build on new technologies to help others. This technology is still in its infancy but the future remains bright for bots that can be created to tackle problems we encounter in our daily lives. Alec wants to further develop what he has created to make it work for people in the working world too. Imagine that, a bot that could replace post-it notes!